Debating Virtual Wonderland: Individual Agency, Responsibility, and Emerging Questions for Metaverse Governance
In entering the metaverse, we do not leave our moral selves behind. My chapter explores the socio-legal complexities of avatar harassment in immersive virtual worlds (i.e., "Zwischenwelten" – world in between), grounding its inquiry in humanistic commitment and narrative imagination. Using the allegorical scaffolding of Alice in Wonderland, it looks at how seemingly fictional acts nonetheless penetrate deeply into the emotional and psychological lives of real persons. Through "three acts," the chapter moves from the inward sphere of individual ethical responsibility (Act I), to the structural dynamics of technological and legal governance (Act II), and finally toward a vision of the metaverse as a self-sustaining ethical community (Act III). The analysis resists both technocratic reduction and the distorting lens of moral panic, insisting instead on the centrality of cultivated moral capacities: responsibility, empathy, and the ability to see others – avatar or not – as ends in themselves. By entwining fundamental legal tenets with observable experience, the chapter invites a rethinking of law and governance not as mere tools for social order, but rather as an empowering architecture for individual agency in present and future virtual societies, not in the sense of egoist exclusivity but in the sense of duties and obligations in the social.